Speaking to the
Dostoyevsky wrote that the degree of a society’s civilisation could be
judged by its prisons. So what do the growing number of Supermax
prisons say about the world we live in? Jessica Winterstein talks to
Sharon Shalev about her research into solitary confinement.

Jessica Winterstein: What prompted you to
focus your research on Supermax prisons?
Sharon Shalev: My initial interest in solitary
confinement started when I was working for a human
rights organisation dealing with detainees who had
been tortured. Often the initial stage was solitary
confinement, a form of mental torture.
I then discovered that although there are human
rights instruments prohibiting torture, some specifically
mentioning solitary confinement, there was a new trend
of ‘Supermax prisons’, especially in the United States,
completely predicated on solitary confinement of the

Supermax stats
• The Federal Government and an estimated 44 states in the US operate at least one
Supermax prison.
• Prisoners spend between 22.5 and 24 hours a day alone in concrete cells measuring 70 to
80 square feet.
• The prisons house anything from several hundred to over 1,000 prisoners.
• Prisoners can be placed in a Supermax for offences ranging from murder and grievous bodily
harm to minor offences such as disrespect, disobedience, tattooing and damage to property.
• Between 1995 and 2000, the numbers of prisoners isolated across
the US rose by 40 per cent. [Source: Vera Institute of Justice, 2005]
• Today, as many as 100,000 people may be living in
solitary confinement in America alone – at least 25,000
in a Supermax and the rest in ‘segregation units’ in other
prisons. [Source: http://solitarywatch.com/about]

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Winter 2010

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strictest sort, and that prisoners can be isolated for many,
many years. These started in the US, but can now be
found in other countries including Australia, Brazil, Peru
and Holland. So far there is no Supermax in the UK,
although the idea has been mooted in the past.
I visited two Supermax prisons in the US when making
a documentary film in 1999. At the time, officials were
less cautious or less aware of the criticism of these
prisons, and I had quite extraordinary access that
nowadays we just wouldn’t get. I got to see all areas
of the prison and spoke to prisoners and prison staff. This
was the basis of my PhD and recent book Supermax.

JW: What distinguishes a Supermax prison
from a normal prison?
SS: Supermaxes are specifically designed to keep
hundreds of prisoners in complete solitary confinement.
Prisoners are kept alone in small cells for 23 hours a day.
The time they are legally required to have out of their cells
is also spent alone in small barren exercise yards. All their
food is brought to their cell, guards don’t communicate
with them at all, and they have no physical contact
aside from when they’re being shackled. Everything
is built to give them the minimum according to legal
requirements so they have very little meaningful human
contact, sometimes for decades. And unlike physical
torture, where the body has defence mechanisms to
cope and eventually will just shut down, the mind doesn’t
have this ability, so it just goes on and on.
Evil is a word that is used a lot in terms of Supermax
prisoners. I would turn it on its head and say that
Supermaxes are evil places. The prisoners I spoke with
didn’t seem bad, just sad and with very poor social skills,
quite unused to even holding a conversation.